You may recall the post earlier this week about the San Diego Daily Transcript and how it eventually would go online only. What the story that prompted the post didn’t mention was how Sean Gallagher, web director for the San Diego Source/The Daily Transcript, defined eventually. Sean, an avid reader of paidContent.org, told us what he actually said was he could see the newspaper moving completely online in 10, 15 years — ie eventually. I asked him to tell us a little more about that and the set-up there, which is in many ways unique but could offer some insights both for niche online publishers and combo print-online organizations. Here’s an excerpt; his full response is in extended comments.
Sean Gallagher: The truly unique thing going on here is that you have a relatively small (40K a week) five-day, independent business paper in a not very mature media market, which is being extremely proactive about its content business model. When I started at sddt.com in May 2004, the site was garnering about 5K uniques a day. About 16 months later, the site regulary sees 15K uniques a day. Online-only subs have risen from nearly zero to about 1/5 of the current subscriber base and continue to grow.
The Web ad model is beginning to bear fruit as well, which says something about the nature of our business-based audience. (50 percent of our online readers have HHI over $200K, 95 percent have a college degree or higher, they spend an average of $3K online every year.) Full post follows.
Sean Gallagher: In 1994, The San Diego Daily Transcript’s owners charged the publisher with getting the paper on the World Wide Web, a feat accomplished well in advance of any other paper in SoCal and many others in the country. The site has changed the way the company does business and altered the perception that the paper was a Downtown paper as opposed to a county-wide pub.
Orginally free, the site went paid in 1999. The subscription — currently $100/year for online only or $200/year for a print/online, among other options — was instituted because the paper/site provides specialized information. In addition to articles and archives, sddt.com gives subscribers access to over 25 sales-lead databases that aggregate data from a variety of different government and private sources.
I joined the site in 2004 after a 5 1/2 year stint at nytimes.com and a move to SoCal. The thing that most impressed me about the management of the company is that they are behind the idea of growing the Web product. In fact, all the content that is published in print flows through the Web publishing system. It’s that kind of vision that drew me to working here. At The Transcript the site is not simply an adjunct, as it is at most other sites.
The publisher, Bob Loomis, and editor, Reo Carr, were also firmly behind my introduction of a continuous news desk. Right now we’ve got two reporters writing briefs and longer reports for the Web. On an average day we publish between 25-30 pieces that provide coverage of San Diego County’s business scene. That gives our paper an enormous reach — as we feed some articles to Yahoo through a content deal and Google indexes us relentlessly.
The reporters also feed our content exclusivity. We pick up releases from smaller publicly-traded companies in the area — ones that won’t get coverage anywhere else. We rewrite the release, add context from our archives and/or contact analysts/company for comment.
One of our major initiatives for the second half of the year is the concept of enterprise licensing. We are in the process of building a sub model based on the idea of an individual company purchasing access to the site for all its employees. It’s a natural for sddt.com, since our main subscribers in both print and online are businesses. (Which would explain our pass-along rate of 50K a day.)
We also package subscriptions with a variety of different advertising vehicles.
I’m not sure the enterprise model would work for a general news pub that offers breaking news from the Associated Press and in-house sources.
Exclusive content is the hallmark of any sub model. In our case, coverage of local firms, databases and special industry reports. I also don’t think it would work for weekly/monthly pubs since on-the-fly deadlines don’t really fit in with their pub cycles — or business models. Sure they could be made to adapt, but at what cost?
The truly unique thing going on here is that you have a relatively small (40K a week) five-day, independent business paper in a not very mature media market, which is being extremely proactive about its content business model.
When I started at sddt.com in May 2004, the site was garnering about 5K uniques a day. About 16 months later, the site regulary sees 15K uniques a day. Online-only subs have risen from nearly zero to about 1/5 of the current subscriber base and continue to grow.
The Web ad model is beginning to bear fruit as well, which says something about the nature of our business-based audience. (50% of our online readers have HHI over $200K, 95% have a college degree or higher, they spend an average of $3K online every year…)
The goal is to evenutally replace the print product with the online. The timeline is a long one though. Will it happen in 10 years? Fifteen? It all depends on the maturity of the marketplace.
But I also think that print will survive in some form or another. Does anyone remember TimesFax?
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